The Smell Test

I have a dear human friend, in your world, who is in the middle of courtship. She is being courted by what sounds to be like a wonderful gentleman. I am fascinated by this mate selection process. We select our mate explicitly for the purpose of propagation of our people. We are not considered to be mated until the female is with child, and when she is, the couple is mated. Being mated is more a statement of situation than emotion. Mates are, of course, expected to raise their children. Mating is also for life.

Selecting a mate is of utmost importance to our people. Since we are not a people of great number, and we are not inclined to have large families, having healthy strong children, who in turn will have healthy strong children, is very critical to us and something we are conscience of when we select our mates.

One important "ritual" we have in our mating process I shall refer to as the smell test. When my friend was obviously serious about the gentleman courting her, I asked her what I thought was a perfectly normal question: "Have you smelled him yet?". She burst out laughing and clearly did not grasp the significance of what I was saying. As I mentioned, we have something called "The Smell Test.". It is probably our nose that tells us first that a person near us is a potential mate. For our females, certain males will arouse in us a combination of sexual desire and our nesting instinct. It is something we are quite conscience of when it happens. From that point forward we treat this other person as a prospective mate. We consider if we will be able to work together to raise a child, if our ages are compatible, and other mundane matters. At some point we know this person is to be our mate. It is at this time we do "The Smell Test."

The smell test is probably as close to marriage engagement as anything in our culture. We do not have marriage, we only have mating. The smell test is a ritual and has several parts. First we must bathe and cleanse our bodies of all scents not produced by our own bodies. This can be done together or individually. After this, if clothing is desire or needed, we each wear a simple robe that has been cleaned and has virtually no scent. The next part is where we strengthen our scent. We partake in some activity together which will cause us to sweat. There is no prescribed activity, though one popular choice is a hot air bath, or sauna. Once we have produced sufficient scent we give each other our robes, if we were wearing them, and we each smell deeply of the others robe. We will then embrace and smell the other deeply, all over each others bodies. While we almost certainly already know the outcome, from the smelling of each others scent we can easily tell if the other is compatible with us. It is similar to smelling an aroma and knowing if it smells appetizing or not

And that is " The Smell Test"

-- Glimmering